Robert, Duke of Normandy (and eldest son of William the Conqueror);
Stephen, Count of Blois, Robert’s brother-in-law;
Hugh of Vermandois, the brother of the king of France;
Eustace, Count of Boulogne;
Baldwin of Boulogne (his brother);
Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine and brother of both of the above;
Bohemond, Duke of Taranto, a Sicilian Norman; and
Tancred, his nephew.
The number of women in this host is unknown, but chronicles and accounts testify to their presence. Two of the leading noblemen of the First Crusade, Raymond of Toulouse and Baldwin of Boulogne, were accompanied by their wives, for example. Furthermore, we know that in later crusades, the female presence amounted to roughly three per cent of participants. All in all, it seems unlikely that women made up more than five per cent of a cohort specifically conceived as a fighting force facing an arduous 2,000-mile, overland armed expedition. What is clear, however, is these female participants were not ‘camp followers’ in the usual sense. On the contrary, Sabine Geldsetzer’s meticulous examination of all known references to crusading women, Frauen auf Kreuzzuegen 1096–1291, concludes that the vast majority of female participants in all crusades were motivated by religious devotion. Furthermore, while they were drawn from all classes of society, the majority went on crusades with their husbands, brothers or fathers.16
On arrival in Constantinople, the Western leaders were astonished to discover that, although he had requested their support, the emperor had no intention of taking command of an expedition to free Jerusalem. After some debate amongst themselves, the Western leaders decided to continue to Jerusalem to fulfil their vows without Byzantine leadership or participation beyond a few advisors. After wintering in Constantinople, they crossed into Turkish-held territory in late May 1097 and decisively won their first encounter with the Turks on 21 May by defeating forces of the Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan. This victory forced the Turkish garrison occupying the Byzantine city of Nicaea to surrender. Nicaea, with its predominantly Christian population, was returned to Byzantine control and the crusaders continued eastward.
At once, conditions deteriorated dramatically. The crusaders found themselves in rugged, arid and hostile territory at the height of summer. Water and food were in extremely short supply, and the sultan’s army was still intact. On 1 July, the Turkish army surprised the advance guard with a vastly superior host of light cavalry. The knights and men led by Bohemond of Taranto dug in around the baggage train containing the non-combatants. They fought primarily on foot behind a shield wall until heavy cavalry from the main contingent of crusaders came to their relief and scattered the attacking Turkish mounted archers. The battle is known as Dorylaeum; accounts describe women bringing water to the fighting men holding the perimeter.
Despite the absence of major confrontations over the next four months, the crusader host was decimated by thirst, hunger and exhaustion as it dragged itself across Anatolia in the height of summer without adequate provisions. Four-fifths of the horses died, and an estimated thirty to forty per cent of the humans did as well. Among the dead were women and children. Indeed, mediaeval accounts stress the horrors of this march by reporting that women gave birth by the side of the road to premature infants, who they left to die. While historians are quick to point out that such descriptions are intended to shock readers and may be more symbolic than factual, such stories usually have a core of truth. Tellingly, at this stage of the crusade, Baldwin of Boulogne’s wife, Godera, died of unknown causes.
Finally, on 21 October, the crusaders reached the plains around Antioch. Like Nicaea, Antioch was a predominantly Christian city that had been in Byzantine hands until eleven years earlier. It was home to 40,000 inhabitants and one of the four patriarchs of the mediaeval Church. A robust Turkish garrison controlled its massive walls studded with 400 towers. Through attrition, the crusading host now numbered roughly 30,000 men and women. This was too few to completely enclose the sprawling perimeter of the city, much less mount an assault on such a well-defended fighting force, but they had too many to feed as winter closed in. All they could do was encamp before the walls of Antioch in the expectation that the Byzantine Emperor would arrive with supplies and reinforcements.
As the winter dragged on, malnutrition, hunger, cold, disease and despair overwhelmed thousands. Some died, and some simply abandoned the enterprise altogether. The most prominent of the deserters was Stephan of Blois and, conspicuously, the Byzantine advisors that had previously accompanied the crusaders. Yet, new crusaders joined the siege, having arrived by sea, and supplies were sent from Cyprus by the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, who was in exile there. The crusaders also fought off two Seljuk attempts to relieve the city. When they learned that the sultan of Mosul had mobilised a huge host to lift the siege, however, the leaders agreed on a daring attempt to take the city by storm.
On the night of 3 June 1098, Bohemond of Taranto led his troops to a sector of the walls guarded by troops under the command of an Armenian defector. Without resistance, they scaled the walls, climbed over them and entered the city. Bohemond’s troops hastened to open the gates from the inside to the remainder of the besieging army, and the crusaders swept into Antioch and drove the Turkish garrison back to the citadel, notably without slaughtering or killing the residents, the majority of whom were Christian.
Yet, the situation of the crusaders improved only marginally because the army of the Atabeg of Mosul Kerbogha was on their heels. The siege had long since depleted stores inside Antioch. Starvation and disease haunted the crusaders and the civilian population alike. When word reached them that the Byzantine Emperor, slowly advancing with an army to their aid, had turned back for Constantinople, many despaired entirely. Desertions became so common that the leaders put guards on the gates to stop fighting men from escaping.
At this juncture, a priest with the crusading host had a dream that led him to a rusty spearhead. According to his dream, he claimed this was the very spear that had pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion. Despite extreme scepticism on the part of the leading clerics, the secular leadership recognised the psychological moment was right for a last-ditch attempt to save themselves from certain failure. On 28 June 1098, with their decimated forces, they attacked the far larger army surrounding them – and scattered it to the winds. The victory was celebrated by a joint procession of crusaders and inhabitants through the streets of Antioch to re-throne the Orthodox patriarch in his cathedral.
However, it was the following year before the crusaders recovered sufficient strength and their leaders found the will to continue. The remaining crusaders advanced peaceably and without bloodshed down the coast of the Levant by negotiating with the respective Fatimid commanders in Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Acre and Haifa. The local Muslim commanders were quite happy to set up markets and allow the crusaders to re-provision in exchange for not attacking or harming their territory. The crusaders were relieved not to have to fight their way south and delighted to have adequate provisions. They reached Bethlehem on 6 June 1099, where they were welcomed as liberators. The following day they finally saw Jerusalem in the distance before them.
By now, the crusading force was too small to surround even a moderate city like Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem was fully appraised of the crusaders’ advance and their goal. He had already expelled the native Christian population to eliminate the risk of the kind of betrayal that had facilitated the capture of Antioch and reduce the number of mouths he had to feed during the siege. In addition, he poisoned the wells around the city so the besiegers had to drag water from the Jordan River. Finally, the Caliph in Cairo promised to bring relief to Jerusalem within three months. All the governor in Jerusalem had to do was hold off assaults by the small forces before his gates until the Egyptian army arrived.
An attempt by the crusaders to take the city by storm on 13 June failed miserably due to insufficient scaling ladders and the lack of siege engines. Fortunately, six Genoese and English vessels arrived in Jaffa harbour shortly afterwards. These ships were deconstructed to obtain timber to build siege towers. After fasting and walking barefoot around Jerusalem in procession in penance, the army brought their new siege engines against the city’s walls on the night of 13–14 July. After fierce fighting throughout 14 July, the knights of Godfrey de Bouillon gained a foothold on the city walls early the next day. They fought their way to the nearest gate and admitted the remaining crusaders.
An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Muslim and Jewish residents of the city were slaughtered in the fighting that followed. This is hardly comparable to the 26,500 killed when the Persians took the city or the casualties incurred by the suppression of the rebellion in 1077, nor was it the entire population. However, Christian chroniclers glorified and eulogised the victory in apocalyptical terms to stress its significance. Their hyperbolic language has deceived readers ever since, although, ironically, Muslim and Jewish sources make no reference to an excessive or exceptional bloodbath.
In any case, the crusaders soon came to their senses. They stopped the killing and instead indulged briefly in rapturous thanksgiving, walking the streets Christ had walked and praying in the ruins of the remaining churches. Then reality set in. As in Antioch, they possessed a city they had besieged, but a huge relief army was already on its way. The crusading host, meanwhile, had been devastated by the loss of roughly four out of every five men to one-fifth its original size. In short, it was approximately 10,000 strong, of which an estimated 1,200 were knights. If any women had managed to make it this far, it would only have been a handful.
Believing themselves too few to defend the walls of Jerusalem against an assault, the remaining leaders decided to take the offensive. They led their forces out of Jerusalem and, at dawn on 12 August 1099, surprised a still-sleeping Fatimid army at Ascalon and put it to flight.
Rarely has an army fought so long and hard to obtain a goal without any thought to the post-conflict situation. Now that they held Jerusalem and had fulfilled their vows to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the majority of the crusaders wanted to go home again. Yet abandoning the Holy City would result in it falling once more into Muslim hands. In short, a means of defending their hard-won prize had to be found. The Byzantine Emperor’s conspicuous failure to assist the endeavour, however, made the surviving crusaders reluctant to turn the city over to him. More by default than intent, it was decided that a handful of men – and far fewer, if any, women – would remain behind and retain control of Jerusalem for Christianity. Their position was amorphous, and their future precarious. No one yet dreamed of Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land.
Chapter 3
The Crusader States, 1099–1190
Jerusalem Without a Queen
Godfrey de Bouillon, Protector of the Holy Sepulchre 1099–1100: The Bachelor
Only 300 knights and some 2,000 foot-soldiers chose to remain in the Holy Land after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. These men represented roughly six per cent of the knights and only four per cent of the other troops that are believed to have set out in 1096. From among the remaining nobleman, the leaders of the crusade elected Godfrey de Bouillon as the man to command those willing to stay in the Near East. Although the idea of crowning Godfrey king was mooted, according to legend, he refused with words to the effect that it would be inappropriate for any man to wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. He chose to call himself ‘Protector of the Holy Sepulchre’ instead.
Regardless of his title, his task remained the same: to ensure that the vast effort and tremendous sacrifices of the First Crusade had not been in vain. He and his men had to devise a means of establishing lasting Christian control of Jerusalem. In other words, they had to create a viable and sustainable state that was militarily defensible against myriad enemies and economically robust enough to rebuild and restore neglected and damaged holy shrines and shattered infrastructure in anticipation of thousands of pilgrims. Such a state needed ports, agricultural land, a sound tax base and a powerful army. These goals required expansion beyond Jerusalem and the narrow corridor to the port of Jaffa that the men of the First Crusade had secured. In short, Godfrey needed to expand the territory he controlled to fulfil his mission of ‘Protector of the Holy Sepulchre’. Yet the men remaining with him were too few to defend even what they had.
The situation, however, was not as desperate as it seemed. While only 300 knights and 2,000 fighting men of the crusading host remained with Godfrey, he could call upon the support of a native population that was overwhelmingly Christian.17 These inhabitants had greeted the crusaders as liberators. Godfrey understood it was essential to retain their loyalty and harness their talents and energy.
The history of the crusader states shows that the Latin rulers proved extraordinarily adept at doing exactly that. The native Christians were not only free of the tax burdens and humiliations imposed by Muslim rule but also had opportunities to advance and prosper in the expanding crusader states. They played important roles in the administration and military and engaged successfully in trade, industry and agriculture. Over the years, many native Christians obtained wealth and power, while even those less prominent benefitted from the economic boom that Latin control of the Levant triggered. Yet, in 1100, all that was in the future, and the records are silent on what Godfrey did in his one year of rule to gain the support of the native population.
One fact, however, should be neither overlooked nor underestimated: Godfrey’s crusaders were mostly, if not exclusively, male. Of the roughly 2,300 men who chose to settle in the Holy Land, some may have chosen a life of clerical celibacy, but it is safe to assume the majority did not. Rather, they decided to ‘settle’, that is, to take up permanent residency and follow peaceful pursuits.
To foster and encourage this, Godfrey introduced feudalism. As feudal overlord, he gave land to men in exchange for military service (i.e. enfeoffed them). Notably, the majority of the bestowed holdings were not knights’ but sergeants’ fiefs. The men given land to till were not required to render knight’s service with horse, lance and sword in wartime but rather to fight on foot as ‘sergeants’ armed with a pike or bow. In short, the commoners who had fought their way to Jerusalem beside the noble and knightly crusaders were recognized as brothers-in-arms and grated land to hold in their own right, a striking privilege in the medieval world. As fief-holders they were free men and referred to consistently as ‘burghers’.
Whether knights or sergeants, holding a fief entailed working the land, and agriculture in the twelfth century was a family business. In short, these men needed wives. Some may have left wives behind in Europe whom they sent for, but most of the men who chose to remain in the Holy Land were bachelors or widowers. Since the local population was Christian, there was no religious or legal barrier to marriage with a native woman.
Marrying a local woman had advantages. First, it embedded the crusader in an existing family network with brothers-in-law, cousins, uncles, nephews, et al., who might contribute to making the fief viable. Also, the native population was familiar with the region’s climate, crops, predators and other hazards. Intermarriage with the local population thus enabled settlers to adjust more rapidly to the unfamiliar environment in which they found themselves. The archaeological record demonstrates that settlers generally chose to locate close to the native population, often sharing churches, wells, mills, bakeries and other communal institutions. Furthermore, legal records prove that the settlers did not displace the existing population but built around or beside existing communities, presumably bringing land under cultivation that had lain fallow due to centuries of creeping depopulation under Muslim rule.18
This integration and intermarriage process had just started when Godfrey died on 18 July 1100, barely a year after the crusaders captured Jerusalem. He had not married and left no offspring. This fact encouraged the papal legate, Daibert, to advocate the establishment of a church-state controlled directly by the pope through his representative (namely Daibert). The knights and burghers in the Holy Land at the time of Godfrey’s death preferred a secular state and turned to Godfrey’s brothers.
According to feudal practice, Godfrey’s older brother should have taken precedence. This was Eustace, Count of Boulogne, a man who had taken part in the First Crusade. Eustace, however, had returned to France, so eyes turned towards Godfrey’s younger brother Baldwin, who was still in the Near East.
Baldwin I, 1100–1118: The Bigamist
Baldwin of Boulogne had been born in France in c.1065, the youngest and third son of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne. He took the cross along with his elder brothers Eustace and Godfrey and set out on the First Crusade with the main body of troops in 1096. However, in 1098 when the First Crusade reached northern Syria, he and his immediate entourage of sixty knights separated from the main body to aid the Armenian city of Edessa.
